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Beginnings in Golang and AWS – Part I

Part I – Introduction, Go, and Prerequisites

The series of blogs describe my journey learning Golang so far, with particular reference to AWS services. In them, I’ll be covering how I was able to achieve a task with AWS services with Go, but also what I learnt about Go at the same time. In addition to some services already mentioned in previous blogs, we’ll also be covering Lex, API Gateway, Lambda, and Alexa Skills.

Introduction

DSL’s aside, it’s been quite some time since I’ve endeavored to learn a new language in IT. Aside from a smattering of parsing through some Ruby and C# code on occasions and a bit of Python with BOTO3 for AWS stuff, it’d be fair to say the last one I learned to any level of depth was PowerShell.

Go

Already providing support for Node.js, Java, C# and Python with Lambda, AWS announced in January this year the addition of Go (short and more commonly used form of Golang). I’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm around the communities about Go, and with it marked as cross platform, fast, and of a relatively simple nature (sorta), I decided I’d give this a bash (no pun intended).

Whether it’s because I’m over-enthusiastic or (more likely) of a completely disorganized mind, my usual modus operandi involves skipping “hello world” learning completely and just diving in. Most certainly not a purist compliant approach…
I figured a good way to try this would be to adapt some of the PowerShell scripts I’ve written previously that feature here. Unoriginal for sure, but as it’s fresh in my mind, why not try with Golang to perform the creation of an SRT file?

Previously discussed in the PowerShell blogs, the task effectively comprises uploading a media file to an S3 bucket, creating a Transcribe job, obtaining the results, and then converting them.

As we’ll see later in this series of blogs though, additional options are available for how we carry some of these tasks out, making further automation and input sources possible.

Preparation

Credentials and configuration are setup. See here for information on how to do this.

Go is installed (see below)

AWS SDK for Go is installed (see below)

You have cloned the repo for the project from either its source or your own fork

You’ve a ready-to-hand MP4 media file

You have a suitable development environment, such as VS Code

Install Go

Naturally, you are going to need Go installed. You can find your appropriate binary at the downloads page of golang.org. I’ll leave it to you to follow the specific installation instructions and any steps needed to fulfill requirements.

Install the AWS SDK for Go

You’ll also need the AWS SDK. Go has a really nice way to add packages to your environment, which is simply achieved by using the go get xxxxx, where xxxxx is the location of the package from the command line. Go handles the rest.

For installation of the AWS SDK for Go, simply use the following:

go get github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/

Install VS Code (optional)

I currently use VS Code, which has some nice extensions to do tasks such as formatting, and automatic adding and removal of import commands. If you’re not currently using a development environment, or just simply fancy trying it out, you can obtain the binaries (available for Windows, OSX, and Linux) from here:

Add the Go Extention to VS Code

Follow the instructions and after installation is complete, launch VS Code. Add the extention ms-vscode.go, which provides features such as mentioned above within the development environment.

Conclusion

With the prerequisites now in place for us to use Go with AWS services, we can begin the process of putting together code which will help us achieve the tasks we’ve already mentioned.

In the next blog, we’ll dive into writing a script that will upload our media file to S3 using the SDK, and at the same time learning about a bit about Go.